Top 500 Daphne du Maurier Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “For myself, I could think of nothing more likely to cause panic and consternation among a crowd of women than to be shut up within a church without their menfolk, and to have the incessant clanging of that same church’s bell sounding its warning from the belfry above their heads.”

— Daphne du Maurier

102. “I was like a little scrubby schoolboy with a passion for a sixth-form prefect, and he kinder, and far more inaccessible.”

— Daphne du Maurier

103. “There was nothing for it but to sit in my usual place beside Mrs. Van Hopper while she, like a large, complacent spider, spun her wide net of tedium about the stranger’s person.” I think I’ve met Mrs. Van Hopper on numerous occasions.”

— Daphne du Maurier

104. “I believe there is a theory that men and women emerge finer and stronger after suffering, and that to advance in this or any world we must endure ordeal by fire. This we have done in full measure, ironic though it seems. We have both known fear, and loneliness, and very great distress. I suppose sooner or later in the life of everyone comes a moment of trial. We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.”

— Daphne du Maurier

105. “I put Manderley first, before anything else. And it does not prosper, that sort of love. They don’t preach about it in the churches. Christ said nothing about stones, and bricks, and walls, the love that a man can bear for his plot of earth, his soil, his little kingdom.”

— Daphne du Maurier

106. “Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me.”

— Daphne du Maurier

107. “Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind. Of course we have our moments of depression, but there are other moments too, when time, unmeasured by the clock, runs on into eternity and... I know we are together, we march in unison, no clash of thought or of opinion makes a barrier between us.”

— Daphne du Maurier

108. “With Rebecca we enter a world of dreams and daydreams, but they always threaten to tip over into nightmare.”

— Daphne du Maurier

109. “The man looked at her curiously. “Jamaica Inn?” he said. “What would you be doing at Jamaica Inn? That’s no place for a girl. You must have made a mistake, surely.” He stared at her hard, not believing her.”

— Daphne du Maurier

110. “In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day, and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die; the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched.”

— Daphne du Maurier

111. “We all of us have our particular devil who ruses us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.”

— Daphne du Maurier

112. “For the sake of your bright eyes, Jem Merlyn.”

— Daphne du Maurier

113. “There was something strangely peaceful about the house, something very rare and difficult to define. It was like a house in an old tale, discovered by the hero one evening in midsummer. In the tale there would be strands of ivy clustering the walls, and barring the entrance and the house itself would have slept for a thousand years.”

— Daphne du Maurier

114. “The terrace sloped to the lawns, and the lawns stretched to the sea, and turning I could see the sheet of silver placid under the moon, like a lake undisturbed by wind or storm. No waves would come to ruffle this dream water, and no bulk of cloud, wind-driven from the west, obscure the clarity of this pale sky.”

— Daphne du Maurier

115. “And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.”

— Daphne du Maurier

116. “If I told you I was thinking about Surrey and Middlesex I was thinking about Surrey and Middlesex. Men are simpler than you imagine, my sweet child. But what goes on in the twisted tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.”

— Daphne du Maurier

117. “You’ve taken me out of myself, out of despondency and introspection, both of which have been my devils for a year.”

— Daphne du Maurier

118. “Resignation brings its own reward.”

— Daphne du Maurier

119. “This car had the wings of Mercury, I thought, for higher yet we climbed, and dangerously fast, and the danger pleased me because it was new to me, because I was young.”

— Daphne du Maurier

120. “It was disturbing, like an enchanted place. I had not thought it could be as beautiful as this.”

— Daphne du Maurier

121. “Mrs. Van Hopper liked to concentrate on food, and I could tell by the way the sauce ran down her chin that her dish of ravioli pleased her.”

— Daphne du Maurier

122. “I thought about being placid, how quiet and comfortable it sounded, someone with knitting on her lap, with calm unruffled brow. Someone who was never anxious, never tortured by doubt and indecision, someone who never stood as I did, hopeful, eager, frightened, tearing at bitten nails, uncertain which way to go, what star to follow.”

— Daphne du Maurier

123. “All memories are bitter, and I prefer to ignore them. Something happened a year ago that altered my whole life, and I want to forget every phase in my existence up to that time. Those days are finished. They are blotted out. I must begin living all over again.”

— Daphne du Maurier

124. “The sea, like a crinkled chart, spread to the horizon, and lapped the sharp outline of the coast, while the houses were white shells in a rounded grotto, pricked here and there by a great orange sun.”

— Daphne du Maurier

125. “The peace of Manderley. The quietude and the grace. Whoever lived within its walls, whatever trouble there was and strife, however much uneasiness and pain, no matter what tears were shed, what sorrows borne, the peace of Manderley could not be broken or the loveliness destroyed.”

— Daphne du Maurier

126. “If death came now, he would be an ally; existence was not a thing she welcomed anymore. Life had been crushed from her anyway, and the body lying on the bed did not belong to her. She had no wish to live.”

— Daphne du Maurier

127. “It is not easy to be gallant in an apple tree. Perhaps you will tell your mother.”

— Daphne du Maurier

128. “We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us.”

— Daphne du Maurier

129. “In love. He had not said anything yet about being in love. No time perhaps. It was all so hurried at the breakfast table. Marmalade, and coffee, and that tangerine. No time. The tangerine was very bitter. No, he had not said anything about being in love. Just that we would be married. Short and definite, very original.”

— Daphne du Maurier

130. “You thought I was mad. Perhaps I was. Perhaps I am. It doesn’t make for sanity, does it, living with the devil.”

— Daphne du Maurier

131. “If I heard it, even among a thousand others, I should recognize her voice. Rebecca, always Rebecca. I should never be rid of Rebecca.”

— Daphne du Maurier

132. “How lovely it was to be alone again. No, I did not mean that. It was disloyal, wicked. It was not what I meant. Maxim was my life and my world.”

— Daphne du Maurier

133. “It seemed to me, as I sat there in bed, staring at the wall, at the sunlight coming in at the window, at Maxim’s empty bed, that there was nothing quite so shaming, so degrading as a marriage that had failed.”

— Daphne du Maurier

134. “Make the drummer announce me,” I whispered, “make him beat the drum, you know how they do, and then call out Miss Caroline de Winter. I want to surprise them below.”

— Daphne du Maurier

135. “It was a mistake to separate us. We should have stayed together. Once a family breaks up and splits, it never comes together again. Not in the old way. If there had been a settled home to which we could have gone, it would have been different. Children need a settled home, a place that smells familiar. A life that goes on, with the same toys, the same walks, the same faces day after day. Where, wet or fine, existence can be a pattern, a routine. We had no pattern. Not after Mama died.”

— Daphne du Maurier

136. “I had an uneasy feeling we might be asked to spend the approaching Christmas with Beatrice. Perhaps I could have influenza.”

— Daphne du Maurier

137. “She sat huddled in her corner, swaying from side to side as the coach was shaken, and it seemed to her that never before had she known there was malevolence in solitude.”

— Daphne du Maurier

138. “No crisis can break through the crust of habit.”

— Daphne du Maurier

139. “I can tell by the way he will look lost and puzzled suddenly, all expression dying away from his dear face as though swept clean by an unseen hand, and in its place a mask will form, a sculptured thing, formal and cold, beautiful still but lifeless.”

— Daphne du Maurier

140. “We were dreamers, both of us, unpractical, reserved, full of great theories never put to test, and, like all dreamers, asleep to the waking world. Disliking our fellow men, we craved affection; but shyness kept impulse dormant until the heart was touched.”

— Daphne du Maurier

141. “He belonged to a walled city of the fifteenth century, a city of narrow, cobbled streets, and thin spires, where the inhabitants wore pointed shoes and worsted hose. His face was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some strange inexplicable way, and I was reminded of a portrait seen in a gallery, I had forgotten where, of a certain Gentleman Unknown.”

— Daphne du Maurier

142. “There is a tisana for that too,’ she said, ‘made from the leaves of raspberries and of nettles. If a woman drinks that for six months before the birth, she has her baby without pain.’ ‘That’s witchcraft,’ I said. ‘They wouldn’t think it right to do so.’ ‘What nonsense! Why should women suffer?’ said my cousin Rachel.”

— Daphne du Maurier

143. “I’m afraid it does not concern me very much what Mrs. de Winter used to do,” I said. “I am Mrs. de Winter now, you know.”

— Daphne du Maurier

144. “We can never go back again, that much is certain.”

— Daphne du Maurier

145. “She was a woman, and for no reason in heaven or earth she loved him. He had kissed her, and she was bound to him for ever.”

— Daphne du Maurier

146. “I always expect people to ask themselves. Life is too short to send out invitations.”

— Daphne du Maurier

147. “I believed, in her strange way, that she had loved us both, but we had become dispensable. Something other than blind emotion directed her actions after all. Perhaps she was two persons, torn in two, first one having sway and then the other.”

— Daphne du Maurier

148. “I had left the land of fantasy, to her to enter into it. Two persons therefore could not share a dream. Except in darkness, as in make-believe. Each figure, then, a phantom.”

— Daphne du Maurier

149. “But you know the old saying? Out of sight, out of mind. If people aren’t there to be talked about the talk dies. It’s the way of the world.”

— Daphne du Maurier

150. “When there’s a sudden silence, and nobody speaks, it means there’s an angel in the room, so.”

— Daphne du Maurier